Folktales, Narrative, and Tradition
Because of the push and pull between tradition and innovation in folk and fairy tales, stories are repeated across generations and subtly altered by subsequent tellers, creating threads of consistency and change that only appear at the broad, comparative scale. Artists, communities, and corporations draw on past understanding of "the folktale" when they reframe and reperform these stories.
-computationally modelling the structure of stories
-following a single "tale type" across many versions
-mapping the use of tropes and formulas in oral storytelling
Genre Landscapes
Genres serve as storytelling tools, but genre categories are constantly challenged by different categorization systems, hybrid, outlying, and overlapping stories. Computational embeddings, especially as shaped for computational linguistics and biology, can help visualize some of these complexities. By mapping features of narratives into a vector space, stories' relationships can be depicted in three dimensional space.
-evaluating embeddings as a representation of stories
-mapping the relationships between narratives
-overlaying different genre frameworks
Community Archive Architecture
Currently, a significant portion of local, personal, and community archiving happens on social media platforms. These platforms, not built for archival purposes, exacerbate issues of ownership, preservation, and access. Other resources, including open-source software, can be used to build small archiving projects. However, such systems tend to focus on preservation rather than sharing or exhibition, which is often the primary purpose of digitizing. This project works to create prototype online folklore collections, encompassing the entire data pipeline, from material object, through collection, to online sharing.
-building prototype collections of personal and research material
-systems to collect public input and create dynamic collections
-backend issues such as server ownership and AI tools for digitization
The Outcomes of Interdisciplinary Training and Scholarship
Recently, a trend towards data-driven social science, and the availability of massive amounts of cultural data on the Internet, has increased interdisciplinary research on cultural topics. A push for problem-driven science has also increased institutional calls for interdisciplinary science. However, because of the very different frameworks and metaphors at play across disciplines, interdisciplinary researchers face systematic obstacles.
-empirical work with big datasets on science of science, looking at interdisciplinary teams and grants
-theoretical work on bridging the worldview of sciences and the humanities
-the history of interdisciplinary fields like Cultural Analytics and Digital Humanities
Folklore, Community, and the Early Internet
While today's Internet is global, enormous, and omnipresent, computer networks fifty years ago were small, subcultural, and a particularly USAmerican phenomenon. However, early forays into computer communication were an important precursor to the Internet as we know it. Public archives of some of the oldest online communities, like UseNet, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and their associated mailing lists, have been preserved by institutions and community members, but gathering metaphorical dust since the mid-1990s. As computers have become more powerful and more essential in the past few decades, scientists have developed new tools that more accurately parse and model large amounts of unstructured text. Turning these methods towards the analysis of "historical" online communities could provide valuable insight.
-tracing topics over time
-creating networks of users and groups
-exploring the role of pop culture in subculture formation
-investigating utopian and dystopian visions of the Internet